Looking back over my book Hardboil High: Freshman

Several years ago, almost eight, I spent 2 days in my family’s cabin on the lake writing the next, great American novel. Sounds like a horror film, right?

Well, nothing scary happened, except for a lot of cabin fever. But not that kind of cabin fever.

What I did do was pretty much what I was aiming for… I wrote an entire complete first draft of my novel. Was it perfect? Far from it. Was it there? Yeah. Did I feel like I’d made a mistake? Mostly. Did I have a lot of fun? Absolutely.

Today, I went back and started putting the numbers together, and looking at what I had. I was feeling more positive about my work, and feeling like maybe there was something there to brag about, if I’d just get back on it.

A book by the numbers.

Turns out that a) I wrote more words in 2 days than I remembered, b) I had a higher wordcount than I recalled as well. That definitely left me feeling better about the whole experience.

In the near future, I will probably be revisiting those chapters and rewriting a lot, and adding more. As you can see from the numbers, a lot of my chapters are pretty short. The result of moving so fast through writing. But the bulk of what needs to be there is there, just need to get back in and get my hands dirty. And work on those chapters.

How fast can you write? Do you have a habit of skimming on the narrative when trying to cram writing? What’s the most you’ve ever accomplished over a small amount of time?